The Lady Programmer

I’ve done a series of posts about paid blogging sites. I hope you did not miss any of these past posts:

• Earn by Doing Paid Reviews with PayPerPost
• Make Money Doing Paid Reviews with SponsoredReviews
• SocialSpark: A Paid Review Site with a Social Networking Twist 
• Other Sites That Lets You Earn Money From Blogging 

All of these cover how a blogger can earn from simply doing paid posts. Of course, these are not the only ways to earn from blogs. There are also other means like affiliate marketing, ad networks like Google Adsense and selling links. The last post on other sites that lets you earn money from blogging simply covers other paid review sites.

Disadvantage of Page Rank Loss

One downside to accepting paid reviews is that these blogs are prone to Google pagerank loss. To be accurate, Google is NOT against all paid reviews; Google penalizes links that have no “rel=nofollow” code. So far, SocialSpark is the only place where I can fully retain pagerank while doing sponsored posts, because their posts always require the use of “rel=nofollow” code.

I had been a firsthand witness of this. I was doing paid posts with SocialSpark then I suddenly hit PR3. Now I’m back to zero because I had accepted “dofollow” paid posts.

Matt Cutts, a high ranked employee of Google, had approved the way things are SocialSpark. Don’t believe me? You can read all about it in this IZEA post.

Unfortunately, props was not given to PPP. I guess everyone knows the issue about PPP bloggers getting spanked by Google. I strongly believe that PPP bloggers are not the only ones that get affected but any blogger that does sponsored posts with no “rel=nofollow” code on links.

Here is another opportunity to those interested in earning from blogging. SponsoredReviews is another good site to get paid for doing reviews, perhaps if you ran out of doing paid opportunities with PayPerPost.

I’ve decided to show the highest earnings that I’ve received from SponsoredReviews to demonstrate that this site is NOT a scam. My highest payout was almost a hundred dollars for a 15-day span. Nowadays, I had been very quite picky with the opportunities that I select: I want those that gets the interest of readers and would fit well to the topic of my blog; this is why I have nothing on my current earnings summary.

Payout at SponsoredReviews is faster than that offered by PayPerPost’s 30-day delivery of payments: payments come into the specified Paypal account following a 15 day cycle pre-determined by SponsoredReviews.

highest earnings taken out at SponsoredReviews (I neglected to take care of myself during that time).

The only means of taking out earnings from SponsoredReviews is through a Paypal account. SponsoredReviews automatically puts these earnings into one’s specified Paypal email account when payday comes. I only used a personal Paypal account to withdraw such earnings.

that payout above in a Paypal transaction receipt

click the logo above to sign up for Paypal, if you don’t have one

This paid review site has a straightforward way of getting opportunities: a blogger gets to bid to qualified opportunities. Paid reviews come in as minimum as 50 words. The lowest reviews offers cost $5. There are also plenty of advertisers coming into the sites, so I often get to paid to do reviews and such.

opportunities at Sponsored Reviews

Advertisers handpick bloggers who had expressed their interest to blog an opportunity. Once that an advertiser approves an opportunity, an email is sent to the blogger to inform him that a bid has been approved. An approved bid could mean an income for the blogger: he or she gets to write a review about the opportunity through a single blog post that meets the specified requirements. SponsoredReviews give only a deadline of 7 days to finish an approved opportunity: I think that is more than enough to do approved paid reviews for the site.

Note that the bidding price is not the actual payment that a blogger can receive from SponsoredReviews. 35% of the bid price goes to SponsoredReviews. The rest goes to the blogger.

actual payment to the blogger

A good site statistics is almost always a must in doing paid reviews. SponsoredReviews also maintains its own SR ranking system but I don’t think this is given much importance by advertisers. To get more opportunities advertisers primarily prefer sites with good Google pageranks. Alexa traffic ranking, Yahoo backlinks and Technorati are often seen as second important qualifications in doing paid reviews.

Click this badge to sign up with SponsoredReviews

Do you want to know more about doing reviews in PayPerPost? Here is the recent post about earning paid reviews with PayPerPost.

Interestingly, I’ve been getting more and more writing opportunities with Sponsored Reviews and SocialSpark as compared to those very hot writing jobs in PayPerPost. I think this is indeed a great way to work with Sponsored Reviews, as I’ve been happy to have a queue of writing jobs waiting for me to write about (not on this blog though, but on my other blog).

Sponsored Reviews is another paid blogging site offers paid opportunities to write reviews on a particular product or service. It is a straightforward site which works very similar to freelance sites in oDesk and Elance: an advertiser puts up a job opportunity, then active bloggers can take their bids for as low as $5 per review to even as much as a $100 for one. This is indeed a great opportunity to put in some buzz on a website: indeed advertisers have the option to post a writing job that talks about great reviews – it could either be a discussion of the benefits to a full critique of the product in question.

image credit to Dan

If you happen to be a part time blogger, then Sponsored Reviews is the paid best blogging site to go for additional income from your blog. Unlike PayPerPost and SocialSpark where the post deadline should be met in a few hours, SponsoredReviews allows you to think about the writing post for seven days after the advertiser had accepted the review. However, once that you complete the review, then the payment is immediately credited into you account. Paypal is the only means to withdraw earnings from this site, so I highly recommend to have an account with them.

Sponsored Reviews has recently announced to its members that they will be performing house cleaning – they have already rejected 2000 blogs because some members fail to follow the rules after their blogs have been approved.

Blogs should be cached in Google and other major search engines. Posts must be of good quality. Paid content of 2 non-paid posts to one-paid post shall also be checked. Advertiser ratings is also another item that Sponsored Reviews will be looking into.

Bloggers who ignore these rules are often “downgraded” by Google and their blogs are usually removed from the Google index.

The housecleaning task shall last for a few days.